Writings

by Colin Dickey

Sometimes, you have to see a thing with your own eyes. I’d known well enough that there was a community of people who believed the Earth was flat, but even having devoted much of my career to investigating fringe beliefs, this seemed beyond the pale. I wasn’t sure I thought it fully legitimate; perhaps this community was nothing other than Internet trolls, trying to get a rise out of people. I had to go see them, and talk to them, myself.

by David Campany

Andrea Orejarena & Caleb Stein’s American Glitch so brims with its own inventive play and suggestive commentary on its motifs and methods, that it is probably best not to write about it directly. They have made a kind of essay in visual form, and I am thinking of the root of the word ‘essay’ in the French ‘essayer’: to test, to try out. Theirs is an act of creative and intellectual speculation, and as such, it invites something similar from us. So instead of any direct writing, it is the root of another word I would like to reflect upon here: glitch.

by Alexa Dilworth

For over a year and a half, Will Warasila visited and revisited the town of Walnut Cove in Stokes County, North Carolina, and its residents. He wanted to find ways to bring light to the long shadow cast on people and the land by Duke Energy’s Belews Creek Steam Station; as he wrote in the text that accompanied an exhibition of this work in 2020, he was interested in showing “structures of energy and power” and how they have altered this one place. But how do you that? As Will himself acknowledges, “most of this transformation . . . is invisible and impossible to photograph.”

by Makeda Best and Kevin Moore

What is your tolerance for personal bodily risk? How does risk increase with the rising aggressions broadcast in media headlines? How much risk, real or imagined, can you endure if you have no choice? And how are you protected by faith—in spiritual conviction, familiar faces, protective legislation, law enforcement, or your own ingenuity? What beliefs, real or imagined, permit you to be resilient or even take on additional risk for the purposes of everyday survival, a more rewarding or exciting life, or the fight for political justice? 

by Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa

Is this a book that sets out to tell a story about knives? Is it a book that tells a story about the town of Wawarsing in Ulster county (pop. 13,157⁴), situated at roughly equal distances from Albany and New York city in central New York State? If you have arrived at this page in Jason Koxvold’s book in chronological order, then the answer may already seem clear. The sort of story this is plainly depends on more than the elements Koxvold has marshalled in its telling—it depends upon the various changeable relationships between what the images show, and those of us now in a position to read them.

by Eugenie Shinkle 

The penultimate image in The Precipice is of a body in a morgue. Swaddled in white plastic and hoisted, mid-torso, on a hook, you can almost feel the dead weight of it, like a slab of meat in an abattoir. And if this seems a crude way to describe what was once a living human, it’s not wholly inaccurate. After death, the body becomes just so much inanimate matter. For photographer Tony Chirinos, however, the image evokes the Ascension – in Christian theology, the occasion when Jesus was raised from the dead to take up a place in Heaven. Chirinos is not a religious man, but the photograph speaks to him of that moment when the human spirit transcends its mortal form.

by Jason Koxvold

It is impossible for me to approach Birthe Piontek’s new work, Janus, without acknowledging my understanding of Birthe and the trajectory upon which she finds herself. Her previous book, Abendlied (Evening Song)², described an attempt to make sense of her mother’s deteriorating mental condition. Seemingly tender and mischievous in equal parts, Abendlied makes Piontek’s family life into a production for the stage, a puckish allegory for the slow creep of dementia: the characters in the book exchange faces and roles, using the family’s archival photographs, or by assuming others’ wardrobes, and wigs; semi-opaque curtains obscure and reveal emotions and memories interchangeably.

 By Shane Rocheleau

Al J. Thompson was born in Jamaica in 1980. He and his family moved from the island nation to the village of Spring Valley, New York in 1996. After high school, Thompson lived in several other New York City suburbs and the Bronx until he eventually settled upstate with his wife and children. In 2017, he returned to see Spring Valley. This book reveals what he found.

by Jason Koxvold

In the spring of 2015 I travelled to Kuwait to make the beginnings of a project about our forever war in the Middle East. As our Dutch plane touched down in Saudi Arabia and a small army of workers came through the cabin to prepare it for the next leg of the flight, a large Texan oilman to my right guffawed, loudly telling anyone who was paying attention that these workers were migrants from Bangladesh, their passports confiscated upon arrival in the Kingdom. I had heard of similar conditions in the UAE, where a few years earlier I had met and photographed a man from Afghanistan called Dawoud while he was travelling by bicycle from a worksite to his home.

by Jason Koxvold

How can the photograph help us visualise the invisible forces which shape culture? As we continue our shift away from the physical — a world of things, which we can see, touch, and understand - and into the digital, these questions become more salient than ever. Wilderness of Mirrors attempts to make sense of these divergent realities, their scale impossible to grasp even as they affect every facet of our private and shared experiences.